re:fritos 20070725

Although I never saw myself releasing anything again in the demoscene I just did a fast demo for euskal party 15, which was held past week end in Barakaldo (Spain). For the first time in their history, they allowed remote entries and although I completely missed the deadline (I thought the party was one week later), ps helped me to deliver the demo to the organizers, so it was all good. I think they even used his shiny macbook pro for playing mac demos so he was very kind. Massive loads of thanks to ps!!!

Everything went more or less smoothly while assembling the code I had here and there and adding some extra layers, more colors (a lot of them!), etc. Occasionally some effect disappeared, because some effect which was executing before forgot to deactivate or to set something back to the state in which it was before, this happened a lot with certain image which I will refer again to in a few lines. It reminded me why I didn’t want to continue extending this notengine after breakpoint 06.

Conceptually the idea is right but the implementation, even if it’s better than what I had done before, is still lacking some things and has too much redundant stuff. But I’m happy to be able to spot that now – that means I’m improving my developing skills and that can’t be anything else than good. The interesting thing is that I hadn’t done any C++ programming for a long while, but even though I was quickly identifying the flaws here and there and thinking of a better way for doing certain stuff which doesn’t feel right, so it looks like learning a bunch of languages ultimately converts you in the Universal Compiler!

This mental agility manifested itself at its most when I tried to execute the demo in my intel mac and found to my horror that it was complaining about the sound not having been initialized. I thought it could be because of having created a universal binary, because that was the only difference between this demo and the previous ones that I tested a couple of months ago when I got the computer.

It seems that some of the latest Mac OS X updates prevent FMOD from being able to create a sound context, and that’s why it didn’t work in the intel machine. So I downloaded the latest version of FMOD, which used CoreAudio instead of the other whatever which was using before, and tried to implement it.

First annoyance: you can’t compile fmod statically into your exe anymore. That’s a pity, since I had began to truly appreciate the fact that the mac version of my demos was just one file with everything inside it and it was the windows version the one which went with an additional dll. But anyway, there we go with that ugly .dylib in the same directory than the exe is.

Then I had to update my audio wrapper so that it could work with the new FMODEx api. While I agree it is more meaningful and intuitive than the previous api, you can’t convince me easily when it’s 1 hour for the deadline! :-)

I delivered the demo and had a coffee, relaxed, waited. And took the opportunity for saying sorry to mad, like twenty or thirty times. Why? Because I took a picture of him in an obscene mood and modified it with my wacom tablet to look like someone else, and now I was feeling a bit bad about that.

One image is worth one thousand words, so two images are worth two thousand words:

On monday, I decided to make a windows port, but using mingw instead of visualc for compiling. The first thing I tried was to create a makefile by myself, but given that I have never created one from scratch, it was disastrous. Enter devcpp, it helped me creating the project, setting the libraries and finally creating the makefile.

I tried to use the same makefile as a base for compiling in linux but that was really disastrous. I spent like two hours installing packages and updates in trace’s ubuntu powered laptop (and enjoying all those nice interface effects when dragging a window!), trying to get code::blocks to work, the makefile to work or just creating a simple empty project in Kdevelop, and didn’t manage to do anything! So I finally gave up and left it for the future.

If you want to have a look… just download the demo from here and leave some nice words in here

Oh and some relatively interesting anecdotal facts:

the name of the demo is kind of slang for rerererererererecycling in Spanish, since most of the effects and stuff here are rererererecycled :D

the song is a remix of 10 years ago which happens to be an old song of mine. I did this version because xphere (from zona neutra) asked me for a song which he would use in an ifparty05 invitation but it finally never materialized, and I really liked the version. It was a pity to let it languish in a forgotten folder.

it ended up in 5th position, which is an improvement compared to last time ppg presented something in euskal (where we ended 7th). Although that time it was 14 demos in the compo and now it was 9 so it’s not an improvement – it should have ended 3rd or 4th to be in the middle again, but I really didn’t want it to happen!

I think that’s all, if I happen to remember something else I’ll update this post.